UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,35
on the wall of a burned-out building, craning its neck at them. Anissa wonders what’s going through Heath’s mind, until he surprises her with an expression of honest sympathy.
“You must have loved him very much, Anissa.”
She nods. “He loved me, too. I’m sure he never imagined I’d end up with foster parents who’d sign an unwind order.”
“Selfish idiots,” said Heath. “That’s the problem with unwinding—it’s not about problem kids, it’s about problem adults.” He spits on the ground. “Your father was better than that.”
“And it cost him.”
Heath looks at her with keen calculation, as if deciding how much he trusts her. He seems to be weighing the pros and cons on some imaginary scale. Finally he lowers his voice, though there’s no one remotely close enough to overhear, and says, “We may be able to change all that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ll show you.”
6 • Heath
Heath knows it’s dangerous to let Anissa in on his plan, but he can’t keep it from her anymore. He needs her to know. He takes Anissa into the fire station, upstairs to the barracks, which Heath has converted into a fully functioning medical research lab. It’s easily the most modern part of this reclaimed town, with a portable generator, a centrifuge, an autoclave for sterilizing, and a high-powered microscope to examine samples—all lifted from a medical-supply firm in Lancaster during a midnight raid by Sebastian and some volunteers. The lab is littered with slides and beakers and pipettes, under a mountain of scribbled-in notebooks.
“This is where it happens,” Heath says, perching on a lab stool.
“Where what happens?”
“Change. Real change.” He waves her onto another stool. “It’s not easy to pull off. The clappers want to do it by blowing up things. They’ve accomplished nothing. Brute force doesn’t work; we have to beat these people at their own game.”
“How?”
They’re interrupted by someone coming up the stairs—it’s Jobe. He’s fish pale and wheezing, out of breath from the climb. To Heath he seems like an old man crammed into a kid’s body.
“This is Jobe,” says Heath. “He’s been helping us.”
“Still am,” says Jobe wearily.
“And we’re grateful. What you’re doing here helps more people than you can imagine.” Heath pulls a long syringe from a cabinet, and has Jobe get onto an examining table. He knows Anissa won’t want to see this, but she needs to, so she can understand. “Jobe, I need you to lie on your side, so I can take a fresh sample.”
The scrawny kid gets into position while Heath eases the extra-long needle into his lower back. Jobe grimaces but makes no sound. Heath withdraws some fluid, then pulls out the needle, squirting the viscous sample into a petri dish, forming a yellowish puddle. Liquid gold, as far as he’s concerned.
“Take a look,” he says, sliding the sample under a microscope, then moves aside to let Anissa squint into the eyepiece.
“What am I seeing?”
“It’s what you’re not seeing,” says Heath, glad for the chance to share his secrets. This may be a mistake, he knows, jeopardizing their mission for the sake of impressing a girl he’s grown fond of. But he’s sure he can win her over, once she understands the full scope of his design.
“Jobe has cancer,” he says bluntly. “In his kidneys, lungs, spleen, and pancreas. It’s metastasized throughout his body. You should be seeing tumor markers, like fetoprotein and microglobulins, all over that sample. But you don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’ve developed a cellular camouflage, a blood-borne enzyme that mimics normal body chemistry. The standard method of detecting cancer won’t work. Which means Jobe and countless others can submit to unwinding—and be accepted by doctors with no idea they’re extracting deadly, cancerous organs.”
Anissa recoils. “How does that help us?”
“Anyone who receives one will be getting a death sentence. It’ll sink the program, don’t you see? No one will want an unwound organ if they can’t be guaranteed safe!”
“But you’d be killing people.”
Heath knows that’s true, but it doesn’t change his conviction.
“We’re killing a few . . . to save many many more.”
7 • Anissa
The sense of betrayal is as great as the moment she was told she was to be unwound. But this isn’t just a personal betrayal—it’s treason against everything that makes them better than the unwinders. Everything that makes them human.
“Have you lost your mind?” she yells, but clearly, if his mind was lost, it happened long before she met him. This isn’t just a spur-of-the-moment plan. It was premeditated, calculated, perhaps for months. This has been simmering inside Heath,